Books, arts and culture

Eugene Atget's photographs

Slowly stealing a city

WORKING in Paris in the early 20th century, Eugene Atget was delighted by the potential of photography, a nascent medium ripe for experimentation. But like many pioneers, his career was more influential than it is well-known. The Museum of Modern Art inherited a cache of his photographs in 1968, and his work is often scattered about the galleries, but it has been 25 years since the museum has devoted a solo show to Atget. So "Eugene Atget: Documents pour artistes" is a revelation; not only does it feature more than 100 of his photographs, but also it includes 20 that have never before been reproduced. The show, which opened earlier this month, also examines Atget's work habits, from his preferred shooting locations to his printing methods. For the first time at MoMA, a negative he used to make prints is on display.

The photos are arranged thematically, to help illustrate Atget's tendency to revisit motifs and locales in order to discover new aspects and facets. The exhibition features more of his later work, in part because MoMA's archive consists of the photos found in his studio after he died. Berenice Abbott, an early devotee of his work, bought the contents of his studio and later sold them to the museum.

The phrase "documents pour artistes" is a reference to the sign he had outside his studio advertising his wares as source material for artists. Indeed, the range of Atget's work suggests the instincts of a collector as much as of an artist. He had amassed 2,600 photos of the city's enduring architecture by 1920. “I can safely say that I possess all of Old Paris,” he concluded. Yet despite Atget's workmanlike habits and unassuming posture, he can seem a romantic figure. James Salter, a novelist, pictured him in "A Sport and a Pastime", “out before dawn every morning, slowly stealing a city from those who inhabited it, a tree here, a store front, an immortal fountain.” In fact Atget knew those pre-dawn hours well. To reach Sceaux by 7am, he probably had to set off three hours earlier with his bulky camera. The photographs he ultimately produced are so pure and direct that his motives seem unimportant.

The details of Atget's life remain sketchy. A sparse trail points to time as a sailor, then years as an actor and then, according to some sources, a brief period as a painter. But little of this grants much insight into his sensibility as a photographer. If anything, it could seem as though his early creative fervour had cooled by the time he took up his camera. Atget claimed his work was utilitarian, that his photographs were merely for the use of artists. Still, his images of the Jardin de Luxembourg are no less idyllic. His more surreal pictures (which so enthralled Man Ray and his cohort) still appear wonderfully off-kilter. And his few photographs of people remain arresting, their postures often just between natural and self-conscious. This is a strong selection of images. Cumulatively, they reinforce the impression of Atget as our first great photographer.

I have to agree with Uncle Clive. None of these images really stand out compared with many other photographers of the day. Perhaps it's more accurate to describe Atget as the first photographer to be promoted as a great artist.

There are only three kinds of photographers, blind, not-so blind, and not blind at all. Atget seems somewhat blind. This is demonstrated in the image #5, where a slight adjustment of the camera to the left would have freed the large decorative lamp from the building on the left side of the street, and allowed an interesting view toward the distance. Instead he overlaps the lamp and building and misses the long view. Inexcusable.

These images are the vintage equivalent of the "gritty" street scenes amateur photographers are obsessed with nowadays. If photography, like any other medium, is supposed to be art, it needs reach us in some way beyond it's aesthetic value. This doesn't do that.

I suppose there is no avoiding the practically innate tendency to worship the past, but let's at least be discerning about it!

Unless Haussmann has been secretly resurrected after his death in 1891, I don't see how Atget was able to document a disappearing pre-Haussmann Paris.
Nevertheless, I share your point about photography and the idea of time, and I think Atget's pictures are a very nice demonstration of it.

I would be more interested to see Atget's Paris street scenes with people, describing a moment of their lives in captured sepia. Contemporary for them, vintage for us. The park scenes look lifeless and dull.

One must disagree with the introductory headline "the first great photographer." Surely the Alinari brothers, who founded a studio in Florence well over half a century earlier (1850s?) were (obviously) earlier, but arguably far more influential.

If we are to judge him as someone who documented a city pictorially I would agree with you. The claim made in this blog and implied for the exhibition at MoMA is that of Atget as a substantial artist. In that case, the photographs should stand on their merits, which this selection in my view struggles to do.

It is pointless, in my opinion, to view these pictures singly and in isolation from a wider documentary concern, and then criticise them such. Atget was interested in documenting a Paris that he knew was disappearing. His work and practice shows he was passionate about the subject as a whole and any great documentary will contain some more or less weak shots. This does not preclude the importance of an extensive record (that these pictures provide) of a pre-Hausmann Paris. If people would like to revisit some of the scenes photographed by Atget today I can recommend Christopher Rauchenbergs book 'Paris Revisited' where he re-photographs many of Atgets' locations today. See link here: http://www.lensculture.com/rauschenberg.html

I agree with you: Art is to create, challenge, enlighten, inspire and inform .

Not the status of the Great, like Bach and Leonardo, for photos. That too I agree. I mean the Half Dome was there. Even Ansel didn't create it. However, in the manner and degree he captured the magnificence, the pictures move and inspire. Same with Avendon's portraits of faces.

But if two wonderful exhibitions, one paintings and one photographs, are on side-by-side and I have time only for one, I could easily let the pics go.